Contemporary Indigenous Performance: Resources for Cross-cultural Dialogues

This project develops and tests two related innovations – an interactive online exhibition and an arts consultancy service – as complementary parts of a package of cultural resources. The package is designed to make the research produced by the Indigeneity in the Contemporary World (ICW) project team accessible to the public, and, also, to stimulate new creative and educational uses of the project’s findings, in collaboration with indigenous artists, intellectuals and communities. The proposed innovations will maximize the reach and social impact of the ICW project by tapping its vast audiovisual records and international networks to foster creative dialogues among indigenous performance makers and cultural-sector workers and audiences, in Europe and beyond. The ICW team possesses a wealth of specialist knowledge about ways in which indigenous performance illuminates social and political debates on a transnational scale. Using this knowledge, the team hopes to build bridges between cultures and art forms. At a broader level, the online exhibition and consultancy service are conceived as building blocks for a new, flexible, open-access archive of interlinked multi-modal resources that will encourage users to engage with contemporary indigenous performance in dynamic ways. Performances are live and embodied, while records of cultural events exist in objects and recordings that can seem staid and unapproachable. The aim of this project is to model a unique, accessible and ethical resource platform that brings the intangible processes of performance making into dialogue with tangible records of specific events. Our objective is to change the ways in which Europe conceives of its colonial pasts and its multicultural futures.